Shiori nodded, impressed despite herself.

Pure luck. Back inside the cubicle, Fixx considered running the ceramic edge razor-like over his skull, but that seemed a bit extreme for what he wanted. So instead he took the edge of Shiori’s blade to his chin, scrapping it against wet skin, losing the bristles.

If Shiori was surprised at the cleaned-up version of Fixx she didn’t let it show. “We need to move,” the Japanese woman told him flatly. “Now...”

Fixx picked up some new clothes in an alley that had been blocked off at one end and converted into a market. The man behind the third stall took his watch in payment. Shuffling the gold Patek Philippe from hand to hand, the trader had been busy congratulating Fixx on the quality of the fake, when he realized the watch was real.

For a second, it looked like the man was going to refuse to take it. If the timepiece had been reported stolen then it couldn’t easily be offloaded. Not if the watch was logged with Customs as missing on the way out. But something in Shiori’s eyes made the man decide to honour the trade.

“What are you looking for?” He asked looking doubtfully at Fixx.

Fixx examined the clothes on show. Levis, T-shirts, jackets. Most were two, maybe three seasons out of date. Some of them so old he didn’t even recognize the designer they were meant to be ripping off. Nearly everything was synthetic, some kind of clone-cotton/Kevlar mix that shed dirt by itself without having to be told.

In the end, Fixx took a black Thai jumpsuit, riveted in copper at the stress point of every seam. To go under it Fixx chose a blue T-shirt. The jumpsuit had been night-black once, a real light-swallower until someone washed it in water and most of its fluorescence went down the drain. Now it looked more slate-grey.

“I’ll take these,” said Fixx and stripped off his own Levis before the man had time to argue. Clambering into the jumpsuit, Fixx did it up at the side.

“Looks good,” said Shiori.

Fixx glanced round in surprise.

“What I mean,” Shiori said carefully, “is that in those clothes you look less obvious...”

“You mean I blend in?”

Shiori and the stallholder looked at each other. Which was enough. Fixx didn’t need their reply. He wasn’t going to blend in anywhere until he got rid of his metal hand and that wasn’t going to happen this side of getting rich again. All the same, the jumpsuit would do when they came to grab a shuttle. If he looked like anything in the faded-out garment, at least it was more like a maintenance engineer than anything else.

“Where’s the nearest CyKaff? Fixx demanded. He couldn’t believe there wasn’t one up here somewhere, here in franchise heaven. Actually, Fixx reminded himself, everywhere was franchise heaven these days.

“Back towards Aldrin Square,” said the man, pointing vaguely into the distance.

“Okay.” Fixx turned to Shiori. “I’ll see you later.”

“Where?” It was obvious from the way Shiori had her hands slung on her hips that she didn’t appreciate having to ask. But that wasn’t his problem.

“Planetside,” suggested Fixx.

“Arrivals or departures?”

“Well, what do you think...?”

Fixx left her standing there in the small square, a young Japanese woman with neat features and tidy hair, who just happened to have breasts to kill for... The kind of woman you saw in everyday novelas about a nice salariman family in Osaka. Except the world of nice families wasn’t where Shiori came from. This was a woman who killed for a living — and what was more, she enjoyed it. Fixx reminded himself to remember that...

Chapter Twenty-Six

LISA says

Two girls looked up when Fixx came through the door. But their eyes glazed over and all their attention had been turned back to the NinSim games machine in front of them before Fixx even reached the coffee-stained counter.

“Espresso,” he ordered, pulling out what was left of his loose change. Shit, with its idiot flag on one side and an idealized silhouette of LunaWorld on the other, it really was Mickey Mouse money.

He got something hot and wet, slammed carelessly down on the zinc by a ponytailed boy in a dirty red Nintendo sweatshirt. Espresso it wasn’t. Or rather, it was as close to real Italian coffee as the raddled Pigalle whores were close to the innocent Parisian schoolgirls featured in the bright holocards they busily pushed under hover wipers.

“I’ll take a machine,” said Fixx, looking round him. The place had that neon half-gloom that passes for slick when you’re about thirteen and it stank of cheap scent and cheaper coffee. Just being there made him nostalgic.

“Lucifer’s Dragon, Apocalypso or CloneSex?”

Click none of the above, thought Fixx. He had a heavy date with LISA, the only problem being he was over three days late and she hated to be stood up. The tall musician shook his head. “No sims. I just want a link.”

The boy shrugged and flicked his fingers over a screen, not quite touching. “Squid?”

“No.” Fixx shook his head and tapped the pocket of his new jumpsuit. “Just the machine, I’ve got my own ‘trodes.”

You could see sad fuck written in the guy’s eyes but he didn’t say it, just pointed across the filthy bar. “That one in the corner...”

The box he pointed to was slate-grey, bolted to a table top and decorated with a peeling tri-D sticker of Stepping Razor and what was left of a SlickShack logo. The other half of the logo had been cracked off with a knife a long time back. Some kid trying to lift the thing to brand his own clone box: Fixx could remember doing the same.

The box didn’t look much but it suited Fixx fine. Anonymous, unpretentious. He slipped a pair of ‘trodes from his pocket, licking one of the ends to fix it to his temple. The most basic neural link possible, slow and not too secure if someone was sitting nearby with an axon recorder.

But the two girls kicking digital hell out of a kitten-sized dragon were so dusted out they didn’t look like they could cope with their own thought patterns, never mind grabbing his. And the little CloneZone jerk behind the bar was leching over some Roricon holoporn while pretending to skim that day’s Enquirer download. Fixx could probably strip naked in the middle of the room and they wouldn’t notice.

Fixx tapped his way into an online editing demo and coded a quick burst of RaiTek, tying reds and purples to anything over 250bpm, leaving greens and golds for the rolling thud of anything that came in at a speed less than that of a frenzied heartbeat. Without even knowing what it was he was coding, he put in the shattered fragments he could remember of Shiori’s fight. The quiet double stamp of her feet, her slow circling and dangerous silences broken with moves that unrolled like a spring uncoiling, he slotted the lot over the top of the RaiTek backing. Not so much a wall of sound as a tsunami of noise. Then Fixx busted it through to LISA, crypt-tagging his signature onto the end as an afterthought. It wasn’t enough.

“What the fuck do you think you’ve been doing?” The voice inside his head was loud, furious. Burning with all the irritating self-righteousness of a machine that knows she’s right. And it wasn’t even LISA: she was so cross she’d delegated the job of being angry to a subset. The avatar was a low-res 40Mb of polygonated, etiolated middle-aged woman in a tawdry brown uniform. He was being snubbed bigtime, patronized even. The woman was scowling, hands on hips. It was all Fixx could do not to scowl back.

Instead, he spoke subvoc, relying on a throat mike he’d slicked to his neck. “There’s been some trouble...”

“You’re telling me. LunaWorld called in the PSPD after you went missing. They turned over your suite looking for clues. And then some three-striped shithead on the make noticed that sure, you had landing clearance Planetside. But what didn’t you have? A record of clearance for leaving Earth. You any idea how fast we had to move to tidy that up?”